The trouble with net zero

In this episode, environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck
discusses the critique of emissions-focused climate policy that
she laid out in her book Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not
Enough.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


Over the course of the 2010s, the term “net-zero carbon
emissions” migrated from climate science to climate modeling to
climate politics. Today, it is ubiquitous in the climate world —
hundreds upon hundreds of nations, cities, institutions,
businesses, and individuals have pledged to reach net-zero
emissions by 2050. No one ever formally decided to make net zero
the common target of global climate efforts — it just happened.


The term has become so common that we barely hear it anymore,
which is a shame, because there are lots of buried assumptions
and value judgments in the net-zero narrative that we are,
perhaps unwittingly, accepting when we adopt it.


Holly Jean Buck has a lot to say about that. An environmental
social scientist who teaches at the University at Buffalo, Buck
has spent years exploring the nuances and limitations of the
net-zero framework, leading to a 2021 book — Ending Fossil Fuels:
Why Net Zero Is Not Enough — and more recently some new research
in Nature Climate Change on residual emissions.


Buck is a perceptive commentator on the social dynamics of
climate change and a sharp critic of emissions-focused climate
policy, so I'm eager to talk to her about the limitations of net
zero, what we know and don't know about how to get there, and
what a more satisfying climate narrative might include.


So with no further ado, Holly Jean Buck. Welcome to Volts. Thank
you so much for coming.


Holly Jean Buck


Thanks so much for having me.


David Roberts


It's funny. Reading your book really brought it home to me how
much net zero had kind of gone from nowhere to worming its way
completely into my sort of thinking and dialogue without the
middle step of me ever really thinking about it that hard or ever
really sort of like exploring it. So let's start with a
definition. First of all, a technical definition of what net zero
means. And then maybe a little history. Like, where did this come
from? It came from nowhere and became ubiquitous, it seemed like,
almost overnight. So maybe a little capsule history would be
helpful.


Holly Jean Buck


Well, most simply, net zero is a balance between emissions
produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere. So we're all
living in a giant accounting problem, which is what we always
dreamed of, right? So how did we get there? I think that there's
been a few more recent moments. The Paris agreement obviously one
of them, because the Paris agreement talks about a balance
between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks.
So that's kind of part of the moment that it had. The other thing
was the Special Report on 1.5 degrees by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, which further showed that this target is
only feasible with some negative emissions.


And so I think that was another driver. But the idea of balancing
sources and sinks goes back away towards the Kyoto Protocol,
towards the inclusion of carbon sinks, and thinking about that
sink capacity.


David Roberts


So you say, and we're going to get into the kind of the details
of your critique in a minute. But the broad thing you say about
net zero is that it's not working. We're not on track for it. And
I guess intuitively, people might think, well, you set an
ambitious target and if you don't meet that target, it's not the
target's fault, right. It's not the target's reason you're
failing. So what do you mean exactly when you say net zero is not
working?


Holly Jean Buck


Well, I think that people might understandably say, "Hey, we've
just started on this journey. It's a mid-century target, let's
give it some time, right?" But I do think there's some reasons
why it's not going to work. Several reasons. I mean, we have this
idea of balancing sources and sinks, but we're not really doing
much to specify what those sources are. Are they truly hard to
abate or not? We're not pushing the scale up of carbon removal to
enhance those sinks, and we don't have a way of matching these
emissions and removals yet. Credibly all we have really is the
voluntary carbon market.


But I think the main problem here is the frame doesn't specify
whether or not we're going to phase out fossil fuels. I think
that that's the biggest drawback to this frame.


David Roberts


Well, let's go through those. Let's go through those one at a
time, because I think all of those have some interesting nuances
and ins and outs. So when we talk about balancing sources and
sinks, the way this translates, or I think is supposed to
translate the idea, is a country tallies up all of the emissions
that it is able to remove and then adds them all up. And then
what remains? This kind of stuff, it either can't reduce or is
prohibitively expensive to reduce the so called difficult to
abate or hard to abate emissions. Those are called its residual
emissions, the emissions that it doesn't think it can eliminate.


And the theory here is then you come in with negative emissions,
carbon reduction, and you compensate for those residual
emissions. So to begin with, the first problem you identify is
that it's not super clear what those residual emissions are or
where they're coming from, and they're not very well measured. So
maybe just explain sort of like, what would you like to see
people or countries doing on residual emissions and what are they
doing, what's a state of knowledge and measurement of these
things?


Holly Jean Buck


So the state right now is extremely fuzzy. And so I'll just back
up and say that my colleagues and I looked at these long term
strategies that are submitted to the UNFCCC under the Paris
Agreement. Basically, each country is invited to submit what its
long term strategy is for reaching its climate goals. And so
we've read 50 of those.


David Roberts


Goodness.


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah, lots of fun. And they don't have a standard definition of
what these residual emissions are, although they refer to them
implicitly in many cases. You can see the residual emissions on
these graphs that are in these reports.


But we don't have a really clear understanding in most cases
where these residual emissions are coming from, how the country
is thinking about defining them, what their understanding of
what's truly hard to abate is. And I emphasize with this being a
challenge, because what's hard to abate changes over time because
new technologies come online. So it's hard to say what's going to
be hard to abate in 10 or 20 years.


David Roberts


Right.


Holly Jean Buck


But we could get a lot better at specifying this.


David Roberts


And this would just tell us basically without a good sense of
residual emissions across the range of countries, we don't have a
good sense of how much carbon removal we need. So is there
something easy to say about how we could make this better? Is
there a standardized framework that you would recommend? I mean,
are any countries doing it well and precisely sort of identifying
where those emissions are and explaining why and how they came to
that conclusion?


Holly Jean Buck


So there's 14 countries that do break down residual emissions by
sector, which is like the first, most obvious place to start.


David Roberts


Right.


Holly Jean Buck


So, number one, everybody should be doing that and understanding
what assumptions there are about what sectors. And generally a
lot of this is non-CO2 emissions and emissions from agriculture.
There's some emissions left over from industry, too, but having
clarity in that is the most obvious thing. And then I think that
we do need a consistent definition as well as processes that are
going to standardize our expectations around this. That's
something that's going to evolve kind of, I think, from the
climate advocacy community, hopefully, and a norm will evolve
about what's actually hard to abate versus what's just expensive
to abate


David Roberts


Kind of a small sample size. But of the 14 countries that
actually do this, are there trends that emerge? Like, what do
these 14 countries currently believe will be the most difficult
emissions to eliminate? Is there agreement among those 14
countries?


Holly Jean Buck


Well, it's pretty consistent that agriculture is number one,
followed by industry, and that in many cases, transport, at least
short transport, light duty transport is considered to be fully
electrified. In many cases, the power sector is imagined to be
zero carbon. But I will also say that the United Kingdom is the
only one that even included international aviation and shipping
in its projection. So a long way to go there.


David Roberts


And this is not really our subject here. But just out of
curiosity, what is the simple explanation for why agriculture is
such a mystery? What are these emissions in agriculture that no
one can think of a way to abate?


Holly Jean Buck


I mean, I think it varies by country, but a lot of it is nitrous
oxide. A lot of it has to do with fertilizer and fertilizer
production, fertilizer over application and I think obviously
some of it is methane too from the land sector, from cows. So I
think maybe that is considered a more challenging policy problem
than industry.


David Roberts


Yeah, this is always something that's puzzled me about this
entire framework and this entire debate is you look at a problem
like that and you think, well, if we put our minds to it, could
we solve that in the next 30 years? I mean, probably. You know
what I mean? It doesn't seem versus standing up this giant carbon
dioxide removal industry which is just a gargantuan undertaking.
This has never been clear to me why people are so confident that
carbon dioxide removal is going to be easier than just solving
these allegedly difficult to solve problems over the next several
decades.


I've never really understood that calculation.


Holly Jean Buck


I think it just hasn't been thought through all the way yet. But
I expect in the next five years most people will realize that we
need a much smaller carbon removal infrastructure than is
indicated in many of the integrated assessment models.


David Roberts


Yeah, thank you for saying that. This is my intuition, but I just
don't feel sort of like technically briefed or technically adept
enough to make a good argument for it. But I look at this and I'm
like which of these problems are going to be easier to solve?
Finding some non-polluting fertilizer or building a carbon
dioxide removal industry three times the size of the oil
industry? It's crazy to view the latter as like, oh, we got to do
that because we can't do the first thing. It just seems crazy.
Okay, so for the first problem here with net zero is we don't
have a clear sense of what these residual emissions are, where
they come from, exactly how we define them, et cetera.


So without that, we don't have a clear sense of the needed size
of the carbon dioxide removal industry. That said, problem number
two here is that even based on what we are currently expecting
CDR to do, there doesn't appear to be a coordinated push to make
it happen. Like we're just sort of like waving our hands at
massive amounts of CDR but you're not seeing around you the kinds
of mobilization that would be necessary to get there. Is that
roughly accurate?


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah, and I think it follows from the residual emissions analysis
because unless a country has really looked at that, they probably
don't realize the scale of CDR that they're implicitly relying
on.


David Roberts


Right, so they're implicitly relying on CDR for a couple of
things you list in your presentation I saw and residual emissions
is only one of those things we're expecting CDR to do.


Holly Jean Buck


There's the idea that CDR will also be compensating for legacy
emissions or helping to draw down greenhouse gas concentrations
after an overshoot. I don't think anybody is saying that exactly
because we're not at that point yet, but it's kind of floating
around on the horizon as another use case for carbon removal.


David Roberts


Yeah. So it does seem like even the amount of CDR that we are
currently expecting, even if most countries haven't thought it
through, just the amount that's already on paper that we're
expecting it to do, we're not seeing the kind of investment that
you would want to get there. What does that tell you? What should
we learn from that weird disjunct?


Holly Jean Buck


For me, it tells me that all the climate professionals are not
really doing their jobs. Maybe that sounds mean, but we have so
many people that are devoted to climate action professionally and
so it's very weird to not see more thinking about this. But maybe
the more nice way to think about it is saying oh well, people are
really focused on mitigation. They're really focused on scaling
up clean energy which is where they should be focused. Maybe
that's reasonable.


David Roberts


Yeah, maybe this is cynical, but some part of me thinks, like if
people and countries really believed that we need the amount of
CDR they're saying we're going to need, that the models show
we're going to need, by mid century they would be losing their
minds and flipping out and pouring billions of dollars into this.
And the fact that they're not to me sort of like I guess it feels
like no one's really taking this seriously. Like everyone still
somewhat sees it as an artifact of the models.


Holly Jean Buck


I don't know, I think the tech sector is acting on it, which is
interesting. I mean, you've seen people like Frontier mobilize
all these different tech companies together to do these advanced
market commitments. I think they're trying to incubate a CDR
ecosystem. And so why does interest come there versus other
places? Not exactly sure. I have some theories but I do wonder
about the governments because in our analysis we looked at the
most ambitious projections offered in these long term strategies
and the average amount of residual emissions was around 18% of
current emissions. So all these countries have put forward these
strategies where they're seeing these levels of residual
emissions.


Why are they not acting on it more in policy? I think maybe it's
just the short termism problem of governments not being
accountable for things that happen in 30 years.


David Roberts


Yeah, this is a truly strange phenomenon to me and I don't even
know that I do have any theories about it, but it's like of all
the areas of climate policy there are tons and tons of areas
where business could get involved and eventually build
self-sustaining profitable industries out of them. But CDR is not
that there will never be a self-sustaining profitable CDR
industry. It's insofar as it exists, it's going to exist based on
government subsidies. So it's just bizarre for business to be
moving first in that space and for government to be trailing.


It just seems upside down world. I can't totally figure out
government's motivations for not doing more and I can't totally
figure out businesses motivations for doing so much.


Holly Jean Buck


Well, I think businesses acting in this R&D space to try to
kind of claim some of the tech breakthroughs in the assumption
that if we're serious about climate action we're going to have a
price on carbon. We're going to have much more stringent climate
policy in a decade or two. And when that happens, the price of
carbon will be essentially set by the price of removing carbon.
And so if they have the innovation that magically removes the
most carbon, they're going to be really well set up for an
extremely lucrative industry. This is all of course hinging on
the idea that we're going to be willing to pay to clean up
emissions just like we're willing to pay for trash service or
wastewater disposal or these other kind of pollution removal
services.


Which is still an open question, but I sure hope we will be.


David Roberts


Yeah, it's totally open. And this is another area where this
weird disjunct between this sort of expansive talk and no walk.
It's almost politically impossible to send money to this
greenhouse gas international fund that's supposed to help
developing countries decarbonize, right? Like even that it's very
difficult for us to drag enough tax money out of taxpayers hands
to fund that and we're going to be sending like a gazillion times
more than that on something that has no visible short term
benefit for taxpayers. We're all just assuming we're going to do
that someday. It seems like a crazy assumption.


And if you're a business and you're looking to make money, it
just seems like even if you're just looking to make money on
clean energy, it seems like there's a million faster, easier ways
than this sort of like multidecade bank shot effort. I feel like
I don't have my head wrapped around all those dynamics. So the
first problem is residual emissions. They're opaque to us, we
don't totally get them. Second problem is there's no evident push
remotely to scale of the kind of CDR we claim we're going to
need. And then the third you mentioned is there's no regime for
matching emissions and removals.


Explain that a little bit. What sort of architecture would be
required for that kind of regime?


Holly Jean Buck


Well, you can think of this as a market or as a platform,
basically as a system for connecting emissions and removals. And
obviously this has been like a dream of technocratic climate
policy for a long time, but I think it's frustrated by our
knowledge capabilities and maybe that'll change in the future if
we really do get better models, better remote sensing capacities.
Obviously, both of those have been improving dramatically and
machine learning accelerates it. But it assumes that you really
have good knowledge of the emissions, good knowledge of the
removals, that it's credible. And I think for some of the carbon
removal technologies we're looking at this what's called MRV:
monitoring, reporting, and verification.


Is really challenging, especially with open systems like enhanced
rock weathering or some of the ocean carbon removal ideas. So we
need some improvement there. And then once you've made this into
a measurable commodity, you need to be able to exchange it.
That's been really frustrated because of all the problems that
you've probably talked about on this podcast with carbon markets,
and scams, bad actors. It's all of these problems and the expense
of having people in the middle that are taking a cut off of the
transactions.


David Roberts


Yeah. So you have to match your residual emissions with removals
in a way that is verifiable, in a way that, you know, the
removals are additional. Right. You get back to all these carbon
market problems and as I talked with Danny Cullenword and David
Victor about on the pod long ago, in carbon offset markets,
basically everyone has incentive to keep prices low and to make
things look easy and tidy. And virtually no one, except maybe the
lonely regulators has the incentive to make sure that it's all
legit right there's just like there's overwhelming incentive to
goof around and cheat and almost no one with the incentive to
make sure it's valid.


And all those problems that face the carbon offset market just
seem to me like ten times as difficult. When you're talking about
global difficult to measure residual emissions coupled with
global difficult to measure carbon dioxide removals in a way
where there's no double counting and there's no shenanigans.
Like, is that even a gleam in our eye yet? Do we even have
proposals for something like that on the table?


Holly Jean Buck


I mean, there's been a lot of best principles and practices and
obviously a lot of the conversation around Article Six and the
Paris agreement and those negotiations are towards working out
better markets. I think a lot of people are focused on this, but
there's definitely reason to be skeptical of our ability to
execute it in the timescales that we need.


David Roberts


Yeah, I mean, if you're offsetting residual emissions that you
can't reduce, you need that pretty quick. Like, this is supposed
to be massively scaling up in the next 30 years and I don't see
the institutional efforts that would be required to build
something like this, especially making something like this
bulletproof. So we don't have a good sense of residual emissions.
We're not pushing very hard to scale CDR up even to what we think
we need. And we don't have the sort of institutional architecture
that would be required to formally match removals with residual
emissions. These are all kind of, I guess, what you'd call
technical problems.


Like, even if you accepted the goal of doing this or this
framework, these are just technical problems that we're not
solving yet. The fourth problem, as you say, is the bigger one,
perhaps the biggest one, which is net zero says nothing about
fossil fuels. Basically. It says nothing about the socioeconomics
of fossil fuels or the social dynamics of fossil fuels. It says
nothing about the presence of fossil fuels in a net-zero world,
how big that might be, et cetera. So what do you mean when you
say it's silent on fossil fuels?


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah, so this was a desirable design feature of net zero because
it has this constructive ambiguity around whether there's just
like a little bit of residual emissions and you've almost phased
out fossil fuels, or if there's still a pretty significant role
for the fossil fuel industry in a net-zero world. And that's what
a lot of fossil fuel producers and companies are debating.


David Roberts


Yes, I've been thinking about this recently in the context of the
struggle to get Joe Manchin to sign decent legislation. Like, if
you hear Joe Manchin when he goes on rambling on about climate
change, it's very clear that he views carbon dioxide removal as
basically technological license for fossil fuels to just keep on
keeping on. Like, in his mind, that's what CDR means. Whereas if
you hear like, someone from NRDC talking about it, it's much more
like we eliminated almost everything. And here's like, the paper
towel that we're going to use to wipe up these last little
stains.


And that's a wide gulf.


Holly Jean Buck


I don't want to seem like the biggest net-zero hater in the
world. I understand why it came up as a goal. I think it was a
lot more simple and intuitive than talking about 80% of emissions
reduction over 2005 levels or like the kind of things that it
replaced. But ultimately, this is a killer aspect to the whole
idea, is not being clear about the phase out of fossil fuels.


David Roberts


And you say you can envision very different worlds fitting under
net zero. What do you mean by that?


Holly Jean Buck


Well, I mean, one axis is the temporality of it. So is net zero,
like, just one moment on the road to something else? Is it a
temporary state or is it a permanent state where we're continuing
to produce some fossil fuels and we're just living in that net
zero without any dedicated phase out? I think that right now
there's ambiguity where you could see either one.


David Roberts


That is a good question. In your research on this, have you found
an answer to that question of how people view it? Like, I'd love
to see a poll or something. I mean, this is a tiny subset of
people who even know what we're talking about here. But among the
people who talk about net zero, do you have any sense of whether
they view it as like a mile marker on the way to zero-zero or as
sort of like the desired endstate?


Holly Jean Buck


You know, it's funny because I haven't done a real poll, but I've
done when I'm giving a talk at a conference of scientists and
climate experts twice I've asked this question, do you think it's
temporary or do you think it's like a permanent desired state?
And it's split half and half each time, which I find really
interesting. Like, within these climate expert communities, we
don't have a clear idea ourselves.


David Roberts


And that's such a huge difference. And if you're going to have
CDR do this accounting for past emissions, for your past
emissions debt, if you're going to do that, you have to go
negative, right. You can't stay at net zero, you have to go net
negative. So it would be odd to view net zero as the end state.
And yet that seems like, what's giving fossil fuel companies
permission to be involved in all this.


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah. No, we do need to go net negative. And I think one
challenge with the residual emissions is that carbon removal
capacity is going to be finite. It's going to be limited by
geography, carbon sequestration capacity, ecosystems and
renewable energy, all of these things. And so if you understand
it as finite, then carbon removal to compensate for residual
emissions is going to be in competition with carbon removal to
draw down greenhouse gas concentrations. And so we never get to
this really net negative state if we have these large residual
emissions, because all that capacity is using to compensate
rather than to get net negative, if that makes sense.


David Roberts


Yeah. Given how sort of fundamental those questions are and how
fundamental those differences are, it's a little this is what I
mean when I sort of the revelation of reading your book. Like,
those are very, very different visions. If you work backwards
from those different visions, you get a very, very different
dynamic around fossil fuels and fossil fuel companies and the
social and political valence of fossil fuels, just very
fundamentally different. It's weird that it's gone on this long
with that ambiguity, which, I guess, as you say, it was fruitful
to begin with, but you kind of think it's time to de-ambiguize
this.


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah. Because there's huge implications for the infrastructure
planning that we do right now.


David Roberts


Right.


Holly Jean Buck


It's going to be a massive transformation to phase out fossil
fuels. There's a million different planning tasks that need to
have started yesterday and should start today.


David Roberts


Yeah. And I guess also, and this is a complaint, maybe we'll
touch on more later, but there's long been, I think, from some
quarters of the environmental movement, a criticism of climate
people in their sort of emissions or carbon greenhouse gas
emissions obsession. And when you contemplate fossil fuels, it's
not just greenhouse gases. There's like all these proximate harms
air pollution and water pollution, et cetera, et cetera,
geopolitical stuff. And I think the idea behind net zero was,
let's just isolate greenhouse gas emissions and not get into
those fights. But I wonder, as you say, we have to make decisions
now, which in some sense hinge on which we were going to go on
that question.


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah, I mean, it was a huge trick to get us to focus on what
happens after the point of combustion rather than the extraction
itself.


David Roberts


Yeah, it says nothing about extraction, too. So your final
critique of net zero fifth and final critique is that it is not
particularly compelling to ordinary people, which I think is kind
of obvious. Like, I really doubt that the average Joe or Jane off
the street would even know what you mean by net zero or would
particularly know what you mean by negative carbon emissions and
if you could explain it to them, would be particularly moved by
that story. So what do you mean by the meta narrative? Like, why
do you think this falls short?


Holly Jean Buck


I mean, accounting is fundamentally kind of boring. I think a lot
of us avoid it, right? And so if I try to talk to my students
about this, it's really work to keep them engaged and to see that
actually all this stuff around net zero impacts life and death
for a lot of people. But we don't feel that when we just look at
the math or we look at the curve and we talk about bending the
curve and this and that, we have this governance by curve mode.
It's just not working in terms of inspiring people to change
anything about their lives.


David Roberts


Yeah, bending the curve didn't seem to work great during the
pandemic either. This gets back to something you said before
about what used to be a desirable design feature when you are
thinking about other things that you might want to bring into a
meta narrative about climate change. Most of what people talk
about and what people think about is sort of social and political
stuff. Like, we need to talk about who's going to win and who's
going to lose, and the substantial social changes and changes in
our culture and practices that we need. We need to bring all
these things in.


But then the other counterargument is those are what produce
resistance and those are what produce backlash. And so as far as
you can get on an accounting framework, like if the accounting
framework can sort of trick various and sundry participants and
institutions into thinking they're in a value neutral technical
discussion, if you can make progress that way, why not do it?
Because any richer meta narrative is destined to be more
controversial and more produce more political backlash. What do
you think about that?


Holly Jean Buck


No, I think that the problem is we haven't invested at all in
figuring out how to create desire and demand for lower carbon
things. I mean, maybe the car industry has tried a little bit
with some of the electric trucks or that kind of thing, but we
have all this philanthropy, government focus, all the stuff on
both the tech and on the carbon accounting pieces of it. We don't
have very much funding going out and talking to people. About why
are you nervous about transitioning to gas in your home? What
would make you feel more comfortable about that?


Those sorts of relational things, the conversations, the
engagement has been gendered, frankly. Lots of times it falls to
women to do this kind of relational work and hasn't been invested
in. So I think there's a whole piece we could be doing about
understanding what would create demand for these new
infrastructures, new practices, not just consumer goods but
really adoption of lifestyle changes because you need that demand
to translate to votes to the real supportive policies that will
really make a difference in this problem.


David Roberts


Yeah, I very much doubt if you go to talk to people about those
things they're going to say, well, I want to get the appliance
that's most closely going to zero out my positive conditions.
You're not going to run into a lot of accounting if you ask
people about their concerns about these things. So these are the
problems. We're not measuring it well. We're not doing what we
need to do to remove the amount of CDR we say we need. We don't
have the architecture or the institutional structures to create
some sort of system where we're matching residual emissions and
removals.


And as a narrative it's fatally ambiguous about the role of
fossil fuels in the future and plus ordinary people don't seem to
give much of a s**t about it. So in this presentation you sort of
raise the prospect that the whole thing could collapse, that the
net-zero thing could collapse. What do you mean by that and how
could that happen?


Holly Jean Buck


So I think this looks more like quiet quitting than anything else
because I do think it is too big to fail in terms of official
policy. There's been a lot of political capital spent.


David Roberts


Yeah, a lot of institutions now have that on paper, like are
saying on paper that they want to hit net zero. So it seems to me
like it would take a big backlash to get rid of it.


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah. So I don't think some companies may back away from targets.
There'll be more reports of targets not being on track. And I
think what happens is that it becomes something like the
Sustainable Development Goals or dealing with the US national
debt where everybody kind of knows you're not really going to get
there, but you can still talk about it aspirationally but without
confidence. Because it did feel like at least a few years ago
that people were really trying to get to net zero. And I think
that sensation will shift and it'll become empty like a lot of
other things, unfortunately.


But I think that creates an opportunity for something new to come
in and be the mainframe for climate policy.


David Roberts


Net zero just seems like a species of a larger thing that
happens. I don't know if it happens in other domains, but in
climate and clean energy it happens a lot, which is just sort of
like a technical term from the expert dialogue, worms its way
over into popular usage and is just awful and doesn't mean
anything to anyone. I think about net metering and all these kind
of terminological disputes. So it doesn't really I'm not sure
who's in charge of metanarratives, but it doesn't seem like
they're very thoughtfully constructed. So let's talk a little bit
about what characteristics you think a better metanarrative about
climate change would include.


Holly Jean Buck


First, I think it is important that we are measuring progress
towards a goal for accountability reasons. But I think there
needs to be more than just the metric. I think we have an
obsession with metrics in our society that sometimes becomes
unhealthy or distracts us from the real focus. But I do think
there should be some amount of measuring specific progress
towards a goal. I think that the broader story also has to have
some affect or emotional language. There has to be some kind of
emotional connection. I also think we have to get beyond carbon
to talk about what's going on with ecosystems more broadly and
how to maintain them and have an intact habitable planet and then
just pragmatically.


This has to be a narrative that enables broad political
coalitions. It can't be just for one camp and it has to work on
different scales. I mean, part of the genius of net zero is that
it is this multi-scalar planetary, but also national, also
municipal, corporate, even individual does all of that. So those
are some of the most important qualities that a new frame or a
new narrative would have to have.


David Roberts


That sounds easier said than done. I can imagine measuring other
things you mentioned in your book several sort of submeasurements
other than just this one overarching metric. You could measure
how fast fossil fuels are going away. You could measure how fast
clean energy is scaling up. There are adaptation you can measure
to some extent. So I definitely can see the benefit in having a
wider array of goals, if only just because some of those just get
buried under net zero and are never really visible at all. That
makes sense to me. But the minute you start talking about a
metanarrative with affect, with emotion, the way to get that is
to appeal to people's values and things that they cherish and
feel strongly about.


But then we're back to the problem we talked about earlier, which
is it seems like especially in the US these days, we're just
living in a country with two separate tribes that have very, very
different values. And so the minute you step beyond the sort of
technocratic metric, which in a sense is like clean and clinical
and value free and start evoking values, trying to create
emotion, you get greater investment and passion in some faction
and alienate some other faction. Do you just think that that's
like unavoidable and you have to deal with that or how do you
think about that dilemma?


Holly Jean Buck


I actually think people do have the same values, but they're
manipulated by a media ecosystem that profits from dividing them,
which makes it impossible for them to see that they do have
aligned values. And I base that just on my experience, like as a
rural sociologist and geographer talking to people in rural
America. People are upset about the same exact things that the
leftists in the cities I visit are upset about too. They really
do value justice. They think it's unfair that big companies are
taking advantage of them. There are some registers of agreement
about fairness, about caring for nature, about having equal
opportunities to a good and healthy life that I think we could
build on if we weren't so divided by this predatory media
ecology.


David Roberts


I don't suppose you have a solution for that, in your back
pocket?


Holly Jean Buck


I have a chapter on this in a forthcoming book which you might be
interested. It's edited by David Orr. It's about democracy in
hotter times, looking at the democratic crisis and the climate
crisis at the same time. And so I've thought a little bit about
media reform, but it's definitely not my expertise. We should
have somebody on your podcast to talk about that too.


David Roberts


Well, let me tell you, as someone who's been obsessed with that
subject for years and has looked and looked and looked around, I
don't know that there is such thing as an expert. I've yet to
encounter anyone who has a solution to that problem that sounds
remotely feasible to me, including the alleged experts. And it
kind of does seem like every problem runs aground on that, right?
Like it would be nice if people had a different story to tell
about climate change that had these features you identify that
brought people in with values and drew on a broader sense of
balance with the earth and ecosystems.


But even if they did, you have to have the mechanics of media to
get that message out to tell that story. You know what I mean?
And so you got one whole side of the media working against you
and one at best begrudgingly working with you. It just doesn't
seem possible. So I don't know why I'm talking to you about this
problem. No one knows a solution to this problem. But it just
seems like this is the -er problem that every other problem
depends on.


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah, I mean, we should talk about it because it's the central
obstacle in climate action, from my point of view, is this broken
media ecosystem and if we could unlock that or revise it, we
could make a lot of progress on other stuff.


David Roberts


Yes, on poverty, you name it. Almost anything that seems like the
main problem you talk about. The narrative must be able to enable
broad political coalitions, but you are working against ... I
guess I'd like to hear a little bit about what role you think
fossil fuels are playing in this? It seems to me pretty obvious
that fossil fuels do not want any such broad political coalition
about anything more specific than net zero in 2050, right. Which,
as you point out, leaves room for vastly different worlds,
specifically regarding fossil fuels. It seems like they don't
want that and they're working against that and they have power.


So who are the agents of this new narrative? Like, who should be
telling it and who has the power to tell it?


Holly Jean Buck


So I think sometimes in the climate movement we grant too much
power to the fossil fuel industry. It's obviously powerful in
this country and in many others, but we have a lot of other
industries that are also relevant and powerful too. So you can
picture agriculture and the tech industry and insurance and some
of these other forms of capital standing up to the fossil fuel
industry because they have a lot to lose as renewables continue
to become cheaper. We should have energy companies that will also
have capital and power. So I do think that we need to think about
those other coalitions.


Obviously, I don't think it needs to be all grounded in forms of
capital. I think there's a lot of work to be done in just
democratic political power from civil society too. What I'd love
to see is philanthropy, spending more money on building up that
social infrastructure alongside funding some of this tech stuff.


David Roberts


Yeah, I've talked to a lot of funders about that and what I often
hear is like, "Yeah, I'd love that too, but what exactly be
specific, David, what do you want me to spend money on?" And I'm
always like, "Well, you know, stuff, social infrastructure,
media, something." I get very hand wavy very quick because I'm
not clear on exactly what it would be. So final subject, which I
found really interesting at the tail end, I think it's fair to
say your sympathies are with phasing out fossil fuels as fast as
possible. And there's this critique you hear from the left-left
about climate change that just goes, this is just capitalism,
this is what capitalism does.


This is the inevitable result of capitalism. And if you want a
real solution to climate change on a mass scale, you have to be
talking about getting past capitalism or destroying capitalism or
alternatives to capitalism, something like that. Maybe I'm
reading between the lines, but I feel like you have some sympathy
with that. But also then we're back to narratives that can build
a broad political coalition, right? Narratives that can include
everyone. So how do you think about the tension between kind of
the radical rethinking of economics and social arrangements
versus the proximate need to keep everybody on board?


How is a metanarrative supposed to dance that line?


Holly Jean Buck


Yeah, unfortunately, I think in this media ecosystem we can't
lead with smashing capitalism or with socialism. It's just not
going to work, unfortunately. So then what do you do? I think you
have to work on things that would make an opening for that.
Having more political power, more power grounded in local
communities. It's not going to be easy.


David Roberts


Even if you let the anti-capitalist cat out of the bag at all,
you have a bunch of enemies that would love to seize on that, to
use it to divide. So I don't know, what does that mean? Openings,
just reforms of capitalism at the local level? I mean, I'm asking
you to solve these giant global problems. I don't know why, but
how do you solve capitalism? What's your solution to capitalism?
What does that mean, to leave an opening for post-capitalism
without directly taking on capitalism? I guess I'd just like to
hear a little bit more about that.


Holly Jean Buck


So I think that there's a lot of things that seem unconnected to
climate at first, like making sure we have the integrity of our
elections, dealing with redistricting and gerrymandering and
those sorts of things that are one part of it. Reforming the
media system is another part of it. Just having that basic civil
society infrastructure, I think, will enable different ideas to
form and grow.


David Roberts


Do you have any predictions about the future of net zero? Sort of
as a concept, as a guiding light, as a goal? Because you identify
these kind of ambiguities and tensions within it that seem like
it doesn't seem like it can go on forever without resolving some
of those. But as you also say, it's become so ubiquitous and now
plays such a central role in the dialogue and in the Paris plans
and et cetera, et cetera. It's also difficult to see it going
away. So it's like can't go on forever, but it can't go away. So
do you have any predictions how it evolves over the coming
decade?


Holly Jean Buck


Well, it could just become one of these zombie concepts and so
that really is an opportunity for people to get together and
think about what other thing they would like to see. Is it going
to be measuring phase out of fossil fuels and having a dashboard
where we can track the interconnection queue and hold people
accountable for improving that? Are we going to be measuring
adaptation and focusing on that? Are we going to be thinking more
about the resources that are going to countries to plan and
direct a transition and trying to stand up agencies that are
really focused on energy transition or land use transition?


I mean, we could start making those demands now and we could also
be evolving these broader languages to talk about and understand
the motion. So we have some concepts that have been floated and
already sort of lost some amount of credibility, like
sustainability, arguably just transition. We have Green New Deal.
Will that be the frame? Is that already lost? What new stuff
could we come up with? Is it regeneration or universal basic
energy. I think there's a lot of languages to explore and so I
would be thrilled to see the Climate Movement work with other
movements in society, with antiracist movements, with labor
movements and more to explore the languages and the specific
things we could measure and then take advantage of the
slipperiness of net zero to get in there and talk about something
else we might want to see.


David Roberts


Okay, that sounds like a great note to wrap up on. Thank you for
coming. Thank you for the super fascinating book and for all your
work, Holly Jean Buck. Thanks so much.


Holly Jean Buck


Thank you.


David Roberts


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